In nearly a four-decade-long journey of Windows, Microsoft has released and killed numerous software and applications. Some of these were shut down pretty quickly for different reasons but some went on to live on for years. One such application is WordPad which debuted way back in 1995 and is now getting a farewell. It will be killed by the Windows team in the near future.
Microsoft to Remove WordPad in Future Windows Release
Microsoft has silently announced the imminent demise of the iconic Windows application WordPad. It has shared an updated note on the official Windows support page to reveal WordPad will no longer receive any new updates.
The announcement message reads, “WordPad is no longer being updated and will be removed in a future release of Windows. We recommend Microsoft Word for rich text documents like .doc and .rtf and Windows Notepad for plain text documents like .txt.”
Microsoft debuted WordPad as a basic text-editing application and Microsoft Write replacement with Windows 95. The app has been a part of the Windows operating system for the last 28 years. It came pre-installed on all Windows versions since 1995. It was eventually made an optional feature in 2020 which allowed users to delete if they did not want to have it.
The aforementioned change three years ago did give a hint that WordPad has taken a back seat in Microsoft’s plans. It also stopped receiving any major upgrades in the last few years which was another hint towards the inevitable shutdown. The company is now focusing only on Microsoft Word and Windows Notepad applications which makes sense.
Word is for those who are looking for something more powerful, advanced, and feature-rich and Notepad is for quick and basic text-editing needs. The team has even improved Notepad in recent times to make it more useful. The application now supports opening multiple notes as tabs. It is further testing new Notepad features like autosave and auto-restoration of tabs.
In other news, Microsoft has a new product launch event scheduled for September 21 in New York City. It is primarily expected to announce new Surface Laptop, Surface Laptop Studio, and Surface Go devices. These are said to be called Surface Laptop Studio 2, Surface Laptop Go 3, Surface Go 4, Surface Laptop 6, and Surface Pro 10.
The new devices are tipped to be packed with upgraded hardware for better performance and power efficiency. The Surface Laptop Studio 2 is said to feature 13th Gen Intel Core CPUs, up to 64GB of RAM, up to NVIDIA RTX 6040 GPU, and an upgraded haptic touchpad. Microsoft is further rumoured to make a few announcements related to AI-powered tools and apps. We may also see it talk about a few changes coming to Windows.
